Yuval Harari on why humans won't dominate Earth in 300 years

Yuval Noah Harari's first book, Sapiens, was an international sensation. The Israeli historian's mind-bending tour through the triumph of Homo sapiens is a favorite of, among others, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, and Barack Obama. His new book, Homo Deus: a Brief History of Tomorrow, is about what comes next for humanity -- and the threat our own intelligence and creative capacity poses to our future. I spoke with Harari recently for my podcast, The Ezra Klein Show. To hear our whole conversation, subscribe on iTunes (or wherever you get your podcasts) or stream it off SoundCloud. In this excerpt, which has been edited for length and clarity, Harari and I discuss the rise of artificial intelligence, whether digital consciousness is a necessary byproduct of digital intelligence, and what it will all mean for human beings. As you'll see, I'm a bit less convinced than Harari is that the computers are coming for our jobs, and that human beings are on the edge of economic uselessness.